To view the IMDB profile of this movie, Click HERE

To call the Lord of a Rings an epic is itself an understatement and that says something about the movie and amount of effort put into it.
Director Peter Jackson had very cleverly mixed old technology with new for most of his VFX scenes as is shown in the examples below (taken from the 540 VFX shots used in the film in total)

Hobbits
Making the hobbits appear smaller was simply an optical illusion, with different camera angles, shorter extras to stand in for the hobbits next to other actors, and simply digging a hole for the actual actors to stand in. The hobbits needed to appear about three to four feet tall - tiny compared with the seven-foot Gandalf. This was often accomplished using forced perspective, placing Gandalf consistently closer to the camera than Frodo in order to trick the eye into thinking McKellen is towering. In order to make forced perspective a bit more interesting, the filmmakers devised a totally new system consisting of a pulley and a platform. When the camera moved, the actor also moved, and the perspective would always be fine. They also used three differently sized props to interact with the different sized characters.

The Bridge of Khazad-dum
The Bridge in the Mines of Moria was created as a miniature (even so it was the size of a cinema). Using a miniature, rather than a computer simulation provides better control over the lighting. A computer motion controlled camera was then used to provide several passes through the set. The computer control of the camera motion allows a precisely repeatable path to be followed. Some actors for the bridge were filmed against a blue screen. There was no actual set around the actors, just a uniform blue painted backdrop, designed to be easily replaced on the computer with the miniature set. The blue screen was not perfect, with bits of the studio appearing in the shot and having to be erased later. Some actors were on partial sets which have to be blended into the minatures and computer generated images.

LR made extensive use of computer generated characters. In one sequence Aragorn is thrown by the cave troll. A computer generated character is used for Aragorn at the beginning of the sequence and an actor at the end. The cave troll is entirely computer generated, with skeleton and muscles simulated to give more realistic movements.

A few scenes from the movie :

Part Two In Next Issue

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The NUS ACM newsletter has so far interviewed professors from within the School of Computing. However this time around we were glad to interview a guest professor, Professor Wendy Hall from the University of Southampton, UK. She has recently been elected President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and is the first person from outside North America to hold this position. This was her first visit to NUS. She and her colleague, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, were here to present their work on Web Science and interact with the School of Computing staff. And she very kindly agreed to fit a quick interview with us into her packed schedule.

When asked about the goals of ACM, among the several ones Prof. Wendy Hall highlighted one of the more important goals which is to increase the international presence of the organization and do more outside the United States of America. Towards achieving this goal ACM has already set up offices in China and India. A challenge that Prof. Wendy Hall pointed out is that people in different parts of the world have different perceptions of computing and therefore the policies to promote ACM have to be different in different places. In Europe itself ACM has different policies in different countries. Local chapters and student chapters can however be of great help here since they work more closely with the people and know what people want from computing and what they feel about computing. NUS ACM, being a student chapter, aims to organize activities that are both educational and fun.

Prof. Wendy Hall is actively involved in research in the field of computing. She is a Founding Director, along with Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee(The designer of the World Wide Web), Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J. Weitzner, of the Web Science Research Initiative. Web Science is a multi disciplinary field of research and brings together academics from various fields of study such as scientists, sociologists and entrepreneurs. The main objective of Web science is to, understand what the Web is i.e. understand why the Web has the given structure and form, engineer its future and ensure its social benefit. The idea behind this research is to help Web surfers from different disciplines get more meaningful results of what they are searching for in the web.

She is particularly interested in promoting women in computing. Her testimonial at HERE is really inspiring. The opening statement is my personal favorite “ .. there are three things young women need for a career in science. It requires hard work and determination, but above all, 'confidence in one's own abilities'. She should know.”

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As part of its Information Assurance mission, the National Security Agency has long been involved with the computer security research community in investigating a wide range of computer security topics including operating system security. Recognizing the critical role of operating system security mechanisms in supporting security at higher levels, researchers from NSA's National Information Assurance Research Laboratory have been investigating an architecture that can provide the necessary security functionality in a manner that can meet the security needs of a wide range of computing environments.

End systems must be able to enforce the separation of information based on confidentiality and integrity requirements to provide system security. Operating system security mechanisms are the foundation for ensuring such separation. Unfortunately, existing mainstream operating systems lack the critical security feature required for enforcing separation: mandatory access control. As a consequence, application security mechanisms are vulnerable to tampering and bypass, and malicious or flawed applications can easily cause failures in system security.

The results of several previous research projects in this area have yielded a strong, flexible mandatory access control architecture called Flask. A reference implementation of this architecture was first integrated into a security-enhanced Linux® prototype system in order to demonstrate the value of flexible mandatory access controls and how such controls could be added to an operating system. The architecture has been subsequently mainstreamed into Linux and ported to several other systems, including the Solaris™ operating system, the FreeBSD® operating system, and the Darwin kernel, spawning a wide range of related work.

The architecture provides a mechanism to enforce the separation of information based on confidentiality and integrity requirements. This allows threats of tampering and bypassing of application security mechanisms to be addressed and enables the confinement of damage that can be caused by malicious or flawed applications.

This work is not intended as a complete security solution. It is not an attempt to correct any flaws that may currently exist in an operating system. Instead, it is simply an example of how mandatory access controls that can confine the actions of any process, including an administrator process, can be added into a system. The focus of this work has not been on system assurance or other security features such as security auditing, although these elements are also important for a secure system.
The security mechanisms implemented in the system provide flexible support for a wide range of security policies. They make it possible to configure the system to meet a wide range of security requirements. The reference implementation included a general-purpose security policy configuration designed to meet a number of security objectives as an example of how this may be done. The flexibility of the system allows the policy to be modified and extended to customize the security policy as required for any given installation.

You can download Flask HERE

For more such articles read Shiv's Blog

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Symbian is a company that develops operating systems specifically designed for mobile devices and is the most sought after OS in the “smart mobile industry”. Formed in 1998, Symbian was a partner company of the pioneers of mobile industry namely Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Psion. Symbian draws its origins from Psion’s EPOC, an operating system for the first generation of PDAs.  We’ll see the story of Symbian from its first successful commercial mobile in Ericsson R380 to the hottest mobile of the moment, Nokia 96.

For those of you, who are studying/ have studied CS1102C, take pride in the fact that Symbian is developed using C++. For those of you who had to study Java, console yourselves as Symbian provides full Java support as most of the mobile applications are written in Java. Symbian was built based on three design laws, the integrity and security of user data is paramount, user time must not be wasted, and all resources are scarce (something like in I, robot).  With these issues in consideration, Symbian OS was developed to be a microkernel OS, an OS that offers bare essential services. But the recent versions of Symbian use a real time kernel owing to market demand.  Symbian OS is event triggered, in case an event does not require the services of the processor, the processor distances from it and goes to ‘sleep’. Symbian also adopted some clever design techniques that resulted in a more robust and versatile application. For example, there are no standards for screen size or keys in the mobile industry. Hence Symbian distinctly separated its User Interface components from the other underlying components. So whether the resultant mobile has a unique screen size or a touch screen interface, Symbian was just as efficient as it was in any other mobile.

Symbian OS has a layered architecture with five different layers namely

• UI Framework Layer
• Application Services Layer
• OS Services Layer
• Base Services Layer
• Kernel Services & Hardware Interface Layer

The UI Framework Layer as the names states includes all components related to user interface. The Application Layer implements the Java ME APIs essential for executing Java files in mobile phones.  This layer also implements APIs for multimedia codec support. The OS layer provides all generic OS services, the communication services, multimedia and graphic services and connectivity services.  The Base Layer is the lowest layer that can be accessed by user side operations. Services offered by Base Layer include DBMS, plug-in framework, File Server and so on. The final layer includes the physical aspects of the services offered by Symbian OS.  The open nature of the OS, the built-in multi-lingual support and licenses from all leading mobile unit manufactures and most importantly the development of plug-ins using nothing more a simple IDE make Symbian stand out.

Symbian, in spite of all these features, has also some flaws. The security of the OS is under scrutiny as a large number of mobile viruses have surfaced in the recent years though not many of them cause lethal damage. Further the devices using older some versions of Symbian have been hacked, leading to the exposure of volatile operating system files. Hence, unlike Symbian goes for a revamp of those exposed files or do not reuse similar files in their future designs, more number of fatal virus attacks can be expected. Some question marks have also been raised over certain aspects of Symbian’s memory management and its idiom ‘the cleanup stack’ which is used to save disk space. The ‘cleanup stack’ is reported to reduce the efficiency of even simple programs but is not officially confirmed though. As it stands, Symbian is unique, efficient, and is considered to be the future of smart mobile market. Efforts by Nokia to fully acquire Symbian support the above statement. Yes, Symbian has its flaws. But its open source and we’ll hope that the flaws are addressed in a timely and efficient manner.  So, have fun with your Symbian running smart phone.

To know more about Symbian click HERE

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